Poor woman criticized for buying grapes (.99 per pound) and bottled water

[Mimosa]

21. Commentators didn't even 'get the point' of the article

You just know all they saw was the woman's color!

However, the Business Week article was unusually candid. Here's an excerpt:

In Lazarus’s lifetime, the wealth gap between rich and poor has widened significantly. A growing body of research now suggests that this may be hindering her ability to rise through the ranks and escape poverty. In the decades following the Great Depression, incomes in the U.S. grew more equal. Lazarus’s birth in 1982, however, coincided with the beginning of a stark shift to a period in which the rich would gain wealth at a spectacularly accelerated rate compared with everyone else. According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, after-tax income for the top 1 percent of the population (adjusted for inflation) grew by 275 percent from 1979 to 2007. For the bottom fifth, where Lazarus’s family resides, it climbed by just 18 percent.

In the recently published The Great Divergence, Timothy Noah suggests that the growing gulf between rich and poor may be the most important change in the U.S. in our lifetime. The world’s richest nation, he writes, has gone from one that viewed “the prospect of growing income inequality to be unacceptably antidemocratic” to one that’s economically beginning to “resemble a banana republic.” In The Price of Inequality, released last month, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz points out that, at $90 billion, the combined wealth of the six Walton family heirs to the Wal-Mart (WMT) fortune is equivalent to that of the entire bottom 30 percent of Americans. Stiglitz argues that even the rich will be hurt when we reach the point “when inequality spirals into economic dysfunction for the whole society.”